 Can I also access it after to find it to go over somewhere? Yeah sure, you can access the transcript also. You can modify anything in 10 days and then we'll publish on it. Cool. It's going to be on your job. This is Shuiya design architecture. Okay. Great. I have more facts to take in at the time to talk to you. So this is a profile that's going to be published in a French magazine called Quazette. It's a women's magazine in France that's interested in gender issues. And so I'm going to be asking you questions very generally about your life. So maybe we can start with you telling me a bit about your childhood. Where did you grow up? Yeah, can you tell me a bit about that? Sure. I grew up on us. Still remaining ours. I was born in Taipei City and moved quite a few times. Went to Germany for a year when I was 11. Went back and went to the Silicon Valley for a while. That was when I was 17 or 18 actually. And I've mostly just traveled a lot in my early 20s, about 20 countries. And that's pretty much it. Otherwise I'm mostly in Taiwan. Thank you. Do you say Taiwan is the place you call home that you feel the most like? No. No? I've migrated to the internet around 12. So anywhere that has an internet connection is home. Anywhere that doesn't is estranged. And as a child you lived in Europe for how many years? As a child when you were in Europe, how many years? That was one year. Okay. Slightly more than one year. I think it was one year in the female. Okay. And that was in Germany? That was in Germany. Okay. My dad went earlier to Germany for a year pursuing PhD studies. Okay. And then we moved because I was finishing the primary school education at the time. Two years in advance. But in Taiwan there's no way for the high school student to jump two grades. And so it was left without education. And my teachers, they all suggested that I went somewhere else to experiment and experience different educational systems. And I have read that you decided to stop school at 12. Is that right? And why? What was the... Yeah, I toyed with the idea of stopping school. As of why it's just that I ran into this internet thing and discovered that anything that I want to learn there's a much larger community. And the time that I spent in school is holding me back with stale knowledge. But I didn't actually drop out until I was 14. Thank you. And how did you first start getting interested in coding? Did you remember what I wanted to do the first time? You really found out about it? Sure. When I was eight, I was reading a programming language book. For me it was a time saver because I was very interested in mathematics at the time. But arithmetic is a lot of time saver. It's a tool to save time and to make what I've learned like formula visible and easy to learn. It's something that's great. I didn't have access to a actual machine at the time but I was simulating it. Yes, I read about that. You actually drew everything like all the formulas and what they would... Yeah, it comes with your own papers. That's right. The components of a computer. My acquaintance of mine, Linda Lucas, did a children's learning book called Hello Ruby. And she's been spreading those in all different languages around the globe. Taking this idea and having those paper-made components of computers and connecting them and simulating key-press and writing what a computer would draw. It's a very tangible way because for a year out, anything that you can touch is much more familiar with the abstractions. That's, you know, you can feel. It creates a much more intimate relationship between machines and humans. And do you remember what actually drew you to coding initially? What was the appeal for you? It's a time saver, as I said. I don't have to do arithmetic by hand. Well, that's what computer means, right? It's something that computes for you. And then it also makes it much more visible. And how did you first put it into practice? What were the first creative visits? Well, my first program is Hello World as any other programmers are. My first non-trivial program was an educational game that shows a line between 0 and 1, some balloons. And then the user would guess the position of those balloons. For example, this would be one-half, right? So maybe you would guess that this is like one-quarter. But then if you type in one-quarter, it will show that no one-quarter is actually here. So you have to guess higher. Right. And then bit by bit, you would learn the entire fractional number. This is for my younger brother, who's four at a time. And how old were you when you did it? Eight. Eight, yeah. And then after that, how did you move on from that? So you created a startup, right? Yeah, I was 14, yeah. What kind of startup was it? It was a publishing house. And I wasn't involved at the beginning. I was the author. They were curating this, nowadays we would call it a blog, but it's basically people writing about their journey towards cyberspace. Well, the blog is called Roads to Cyberspace. And so it was on the bulletin board system, which is online forum. And people who just stood on it mostly submitted their journeys. And the curational team and the publishing house informationist, who has the name, curious that into a book. And after the book was published, I looked at the website of the publisher and saw that it was not very appealing. And so it took a week to code out an unofficial webpage. And then it was so appealing that the publishing house decided, OK, maybe I'll just use this as an official page. And then gradually bit by bit I become kind of the CTO of the publishing house. And then by the time I was 15, the publishing house decided to change into a software publishing house, publishing a few pieces of software that I've written throughout the years. And so that's when I become a shareholder and started running the company. And how long did you stay with that startup? That was since 1995 to 1997, I think. And then after that, what was the next step? After that, I went back to university and attended for a year and have a lot of graduate school studies trying to understand through humanities and philosophy. And other disciplines, cognitive science, had to understand the complex behavior that we've seen. And I'm also a consultant, I think, for the BenQ company. BenQ, B-E-N-Q. It was not yet known as BenQ and I joined. It was called Acer Peripherals, which means it's a peripheral company to Acer Corporation. And I went to China and as well as Silicon Valley as part of the consultant's work. And eventually we started a startup in Silicon Valley and then I won around the turn of the century. It was 1999 and 2000. Just to come back to something, you were saying that when you went back to university, what sort of insights did that provide you on the behaviors we see online? What did you understand through that? Sure. I had a lot of conversations, a mentor, a relationship with a cognitive scientist and philosopher in a nearby university. And his interest at the time was around what we call conciliance, which means an anti-disciplinary approach, studying a problem without constraints of any academic fields. Around that time these were very vague ideas, complex systems and sort of anti-disciplinary research. Those were in its very early days. We had some philosophical predecessors like Vera Append and so on, but there's no methodology, so to speak, in this pursuit. So that was when I started charting, so to speak, my research agenda. I think that was very helpful in that my first mentors, there was Tim Lane, as I said, a philosopher of cognitive science and also another philosopher studying Gadema of the German philosopher, the hermeneutic tradition and also around phenomenology and Kant and a lot of other philosophers of science and around science. Aside from that, I also studied from the traditional Chinese thought process. There was a classical Chinese teacher, Yutian Song, who was very instrumental. In Taiwan's what we call the Xiang Tu Wen Xue, the regional grassroots literature identity, that there was also a true form and of course also computational linguistics and where anything I can find locally. That was the main inspirations that I drew from. What did it lead you to understand about how people behave online? A few things, right? Online we're all handicapped in some way. It's as if we enter the world of people on the autism spectrum in that we're forced to be mostly verbal because all the non-verbal signals either gets dropped or reduced or somehow changes meaning through this asynchronous communication. Most people see the cyberspace as something that transcends space, which is true but I think psychologically the most important part is that it transcends time. It makes a lot of time-delayed conversations and so it's a self-selecting thing. People who are very good at verbal expressions get disproportionate representation and words themselves evolve much quickly and people tend to trust other people much more quickly just because of the same words that they tend to use and this is something that we don't see in face-to-face conversations, right? So it's in a way compressed but also in a way expanded. The collaboration is much easier because across the internet you can't really harm the other person except psychologically where we work with that too and also people become fused in a kind of subconscious way because one person's emotion even though the emotion is over affects other people when they see after a time delay these kind of emotional utterances. So basically it's like an ecosystem where people's sentiments and effects evolve and compete for the scarcity of attention and so we see a lot of emotions that are not dominant in face-to-face world becomes much easier to download in this online world in particular sentiments of outrage and that's fascinating to me. Back to the second start-up with the ASR and then how did it move on from that? So yeah, I created my own start-up as the president of a small company trying to figure out how open source which was invented around 1998 this moniker trying to reconcile the traditional free software world and the commercial software world by creating something that's valuable to the commercial side and to the civil society and it was fun. From 2000 we wrote a manifesto called Sacro Space Anarchy trying to figure out all the processes that it would take for a self-governing anarchistic community to thrive online and try to work piecemeal to make it happen. And around 2002 we started working on this open foundry project which would be sponsored by the academia Seneca in Taiwan and become the bedrock of the open source community in Taiwan. So that took me a little bit out of the private sector and into the academic and the public sector. And around 2005 I started leading this international effort of hundreds of computer scientists trying to reinvent the programming language that we use to respond to the new hardware situation which is that the CPUs stop getting faster and we get more CPUs and we get GPUs and the programming language need to change because of that so it's like a rewriting of a constitution so it's re-creating the language. And that took me to dozens of countries and it took I think with 2005 to 2008. And then I joined some Silicon Valley companies around 2008. Social text was the first one. And then quite a few startups as consultants or as shareholders and two years later an old friend of mine we've been working together for 11 years and he's at Apple working on computational linguistics on Siri but he wanted to pursue his PhD study so he invited me to help taking care of his department while he went to his PhD research so I helped him carrying that team for six years. When did that start? 2010. I've heard that from 2011 or so you decided to retire? That was 2014. We got social text acquired in 2013 by a very large company the Bedford Group People Fluent was the HR company that bought social text and so that left me with some cash because my income was very steady so I was like I don't have to work for any company so it mostly devoted my time to the public sector and the civil society. Can you tell me about that when was the first time you got involved with the civil society in the public sector? As I said back in the 96 or so it was already in the online civil right movement because free speech and freedom of assembly online is as much as a movement as an education because mostly people who didn't have first-hand experience didn't really know what this is about so that's what I mostly worked on is our education and awareness campaigns and then the free software movement moved into what we call the free culture movement which is trying to get more creators to relinquish most of their copyright so that people who they don't know can carry on their work and I was involved very, very early on there was last century stuff so yeah, there's no clear point in which I got involved and when the I don't know how to say it but G got zero how can you tell me a bit about that? It started by the co-author of the Cyberspace NRK Manifesto and my co-founder in 2000 Jia Yang Gao or CEO Gao he was attending a hackathon by Yahoo and they were originally trying to write some e-commerce site which is a very generic hackathon topic but then at the time the Taiwanese government ran an advertisement as you might have already read that said the economic boosting-up plan is too complicated, ordinary citizens doesn't have a chance to understand it so just follow whatever the government says and trust the government blindly and it's not a very popular advertisement so filled with outrage Italian and three of his friends changed their hackathon topic to put a visualization of the total national budget proving that actually it's not ordinary citizens not able to understand the part of budget that concerns them but that you know the translation of work the government really haven't done and so this is basically what they call forking the government meaning taking what the government has to offer by taking it to a different direction and I joined a couple months later working on a dictionary project which was early 2013 January and so the aim here is really to take the information that's there and make it understandable and once it's understandable also create a venue for participation on the original national budget visualization platform budget.gov0.tw there's already for each budget item a conversation forum where you can write in your opinions and click whether you want this budget item to increase or decrease or to be cut and so this creates a bi-directional mechanism and it's around specific budget items people don't talk vaguely about the national budget they talk about one thing so there's also a way for participation to happen has it had some effects on the government taking into account some sure of course so by 2014 end of 2014 after the Occupy a lot of mayors won by appealing to this kind of bi-directional internet mediated conversation and so the budget platform became Taipei City's budget platform officially budget.taipei which the mayor read before the budget effort because you know people really have to understand what the budget was about before proposing PB and then it's been spreading to six or seven, I think seven now different cities in Taiwan and as for the national budget itself starting I think early March all our presidential promises once they're translated into budget items that will be visible in a very similar way and that's a direct result of me being the digital ministry is that we take those proven engagement modes and try to maintain it so that they become part of the national governance mechanism and has it focused on the budget or has there also been other types of policies and things that were explained in this way sure it's not just budgets and their execution and their every month or every quarter reviews we're publishing this online and making it for them but we're also publishing online all the regulations and all the trade related laws 60 days before they become in effect for public discussion and maybe changing the directions and also we have a national petition system where people can counter sign a petition and make sure that the government makes a timely and useful substantial dialogue yeah we're introducing mechanisms basically all around the policy cycle so whether it's early whether it's proactive or reactive whether it was government initiated or people initiated we're trying to make sure that all these are possible did you have an example within the budgets of one point that was discussed very strongly and then something was changed sure for the Taipei city budget there was a lot of conversation around the construction of sport related facilities people want to make sure that it's useful multi-purpose and it was a very large public conversation around the so-called large Taipei dome and it would benefit a lot from this kind of radical transparency yeah I should note that after the budget that Taipei launched people got into this conversation online just like we did in the Guapseiro national budget but for a national budget because it was a community effort people just chatted among themselves but for the Taipei city one three weeks after this free chatting people were very surprised to find that every single barrier in Taipei city came and responded to every single topic on the forum so it's creating a direct line between professional public servants and citizens circumventing so to speak the proxies that usually work between them representing democracy people took that as a sign of authentic goodwill from the city government and how do people in Taiwan react to this are they very receptive do they really want to take part yeah and Taiwan is very unique in that the first generation that got access to the internet was also the first generation that had democracy because the martial law was lifted early at like early 90s in 89 actually which is also where the personal community revolution happened so we have the same generation which is the internet and democracy and to what extent do you feel that the philosophy that's sort of prevalent on the internet is being translated into civic or political affairs through all these kinds of initiatives is it the same philosophy sure yeah on the internet what we call this is what we call an open multi-stakeholder governance model meaning that we try to get everyone who would be affected by a policy to come and discuss but of course this is not entirely applicable as I said at the very beginning the internet community was able to make this happen because in the early days everybody who had participation was very good at reading and writing and at imagining things in castles just by reading words but this is by necessity because that's what programmers do that's what code makers and law makers do but it's also kind of exclusive people who did not have this kind of skill but have other very useful inputs are excluded from the multi-stakeholder process on the early internet so for things like the national regional policy of course it affects not only people who are good at reading and writing but also people who are good at non-verbal communication at body language at all sorts of children even or prefaced tangible stuff so I mean to do a good whole speaking processes now our duty multimodal meaning that we not only need to translate the abstractions to graphic or interactive or audio-visual ways that people can relate to but also to take as input all those non-writing sources and make sure that everybody can understand everybody across the different cognitive functions it was very expensive to do things this way but this was artificial intelligence much easier so how can you use artificial intelligence to take inputs that are not verbal how does that work well for example the west that we're speaking into this recorder we're feeding it to a artificial intelligence that transcribes this into less and this technology was only mature this year really if people who don't speak English another artificial intelligence can take this and then translate to English approximating already human translators and that's another thing once it's translated into Chinese another artificial intelligence can take it and creates real-time visualizations of all the topics that we've been discussing and showing you relevant information that may fill in people who are not vast in the what multistakeholderism is they could create a translational memory or a lexicon and then yet another artificial intelligence can take that and try to create some 3D models and relevant pictures and try to find relevant images that corresponds to what we were talking about and so on so every step of course it needs human curation but mundane work is now actually carried by a lot of automated mechanisms and what about taking into account people's non-verbal expressions and so if you take a transcript and actually recording whether it's visual or audio and you subtract the verbal message from it then what you're left, the remainder is the style and so it's already possible for example to take a picture of Van Gogh and then a photo of something that Van Gogh has never seen and then ask the artificial intelligence to apply Van Gogh's style to this painting and then create a style of painting so not only we can transfer concepts but we can also transfer the remainder which is style so artificial intelligence at the moment can assign emotional weight to tell irony to tell the impact of affect of what people are stressing or putting into words and yet other artificial intelligence may direct a facilitator's attention if you have 10 people or 20 people in a room, a virtual one maybe to get emotional assessment because a good facilitator needs to be in tune to everybody's level of state which is very difficult across the internet even you have the best video conference and stuff still something is lost so we're trying to get that back and of course the facilitator would then need to either have a panorama of a view of every other participant or we can use the cheaper technology of a virtual reality which is mature maybe later this year so we're trying all kinds of modalities to bring the number of signals back to our cognitive systems and what about your current post how did that come about how were you approached and what was the process well there was a presidential campaign like after Tsai Ing-wen I voted for her like radical progressive by Asian standards somewhat progressive by European standards and in any case one part of the platform was called the Asia Silicon Valley Plan but due to a unfortunate grammatical fact of Chinese when people see Asia Silicon Valley they think Asian Silicon Valley meaning a Silicon Valley in Asia which is something that's kind of offensive to people who actually work in Silicon Valley and knowing you can't really duplicate it here and it's also unfair to Taiwanese culture which I think have a lot to commend that is not part of Silicon Valley which we actually thrives because of this so it's doing an injustice to both Taiwan and Silicon Valley so because of that there's a lot of resistance especially around the startups circles to this policy and so the premier at the time Lin Chun still the premier said put a halt to this platform saying that we need to readjust and try a different communication strategy so that people wouldn't think that we're rebuilding a science park around the digital economy in the Italian city for no purpose whatsoever so I was part of that redefinition meeting and suggested that we put a thought between Asia and Silicon Valley so that people understand it that we're just connecting we're linking with Asia we're connecting to Silicon Valley but we're not trying to be it does seem to work the startup circle seems to understand so I would say yeah I did some communication work and the premier seems impressed and asked me to try to find a minister for digital affairs to play a similar role to make sure that misunderstandings like this don't happen again so I asked around to ask a lot of my friends I think around 10 people about 5 of them I think are more suited to this job but they all refused studying my reason but mostly saying that they would not enjoy this work but they all think that well at least while I may not be the best fit at least I enjoy this work which is kind of important so they all recommended me and said to the premier that I can't find an announcement I'm willing to give it a try and that's how I got in when did you start? it was first of October and what are your main tasks? well open government there's a main mandate and there's a supporting factor also the use console which is open government but especially for young people and then social enterprises which is mostly around young people and startups that also carries this social impact and sustainability this mission that's most remanded but open government is the main one so what are your main projects for the next few months what are you planning to do? as I said there's this systematic establishment of multistakeholderism around all parts of policy cycle where we're trying to make this happen through regulations through bylaws we're trying to pass this digital telecommunication law which is the fundamental law for internet it's like the digital republic law in France it established this basic engagement rules between the existing legal system and the internet and the important part of that law is a multistakeholder mechanism this public commentary period, this public forum for all the policies as far as I understand it was in the original draft of the french digital republic law it was removed by the senate so yeah we thought just to look up to France and took their information details but then it happened so we're trying to make this happen now so yeah just getting governments to public servants to trust strangers to trust citizens more and maybe this isn't the trust more in return eventually what's the situation in Taiwan in terms of the sunflower movement how is that working out is it the long going or sure the sunflower movement was the occupied extended for 22 days but the main appeal I think was this kind of demonstration that people can really work with strangers have a million strangers on the street helped with professional facilitators and like fact checkers translators and also a way for recording to appear and all three skills taken together creates a deliberative reflective space where people in this occupy converge everyday towards the consensus gradually and so the final consensus that was agreed by the occupiers and also by the head of parliament at this time was that this is a rethink of the institutional organization of the society that all political decisions from here ours need to take all these stakeholders into account not just the ordinary associations and their representatives and that the tools that we developed through those 22 days are all open source and free culture and that they are taking the seeds all around Taiwan and the globe to make sure that people understand that there is no way for strangers in the real space to converge if they put attention to it and this is the promise really of any occupied but Taiwan is radically nonviolent so we did this in a very systematic fashion it's almost like a case study so I wouldn't say it's just in Taiwan whatever we did was a model for a new debut for all the occupiers afterwards which of course then improved our methodologies just as we did building on the occupiers but like in Hong Kong do you feel that they are inspired by well yeah I mean they did took exam reviews and programming they supported logistics and it's really an export of the sampler technologies to Hong Kong and is the situation still quite tense with some people from the movement and the new government or are they very much behind the new government the sampler occupiers eventually would form two parties the social democrats and the new powers the new powers became the third largest party in the parliament the social democrats still remains mostly on the street but also in the city governments they got a lot of people in two city governments so I wouldn't say well as political workers not as mayors but then we get people who are independents like nonpartisans into mayors like the type of mayor but also in the cabinet the cabinet in this cabinet there's more independents than members of anybody which is kind of rare so there's a new political climate of independents the parliament is of course still pretty partisan but at least there's this one dominated party the democratic progressives and the new powers has been pretty vocal but I wouldn't say they're behind the democratic progressives yeah could you talk a bit about your decision to change land did you decide that and how did you know if that was something you wanted to do oh man if I change genders my genders whatever but when I encountered people online when I was 12 or so especially people from the US in those communities my online interactions they perceive as decisively famine and I wouldn't mind I mean it doesn't really matter and so for many communities starting from 93 they've just lived as a woman but for other communities sometimes they perceive as a man sometimes it does a little matter and my startup friends were all LGBTQ people so it doesn't really matter and so that isn't fair there's one straight person but in any case we're very diverse so it was great I was raised essentially through adolescence in online and offline environments that doesn't care about gender it's gender-blind so to speak I think made me kind of consciously gender-blind afterwards it would be useful especially online but also online to steer with my people that's pretty much it did you feel that more and more young people think like that I was living in America before and it feels like it's a big movement now I mean a lot of people just decide that gender is not relevant is that also like that here in Taiwan? yeah sure Taiwan's unique in Asia very vocal I think it was tied to Taiwan's quest for absolute freedom expression it would be like a just a slogan in other countries especially European countries by Taiwan people took it very seriously and inside the government even had the inkling of trying to censor speech people just got very outraged and that never happened so we kind of took as the core of the community building that everybody no matter of gender or whatever other status must have equal say I think that contributes to this huge explosion of LGBTQ communities this radical demand for expression is that something that started after 89 that's when it really to not go back it's a reaction formation really it was a dictatorship and people died his mother's quest in the quest for absolute expression for it what's the role of China in all of this how does it try and influence Taiwan and go against this free expression because I know in Hong Kong they're not really allowed to do what they want Hong Kong's in a very difficult place well the mainland China I think as opposed to Hong Kong China the mainland China is doing a lot of interesting social experiments at the beginning of the Great Firework Project the Golden Shield Taiwan was very much caught in it because there was also during the years where there was a lot of commercial flow between mainland and Taiwan because post 89 it was a while where foreign investors didn't really want to deal with China but Taiwan still supplied a lot of talents and ICT technologies in the China's modernization project and so the Golden Shield is something that affects pretty much everyone in Taiwan who travels to China and we were acutely aware of every step of its evolution so we had our Snowden moments years before it became an international phenomenon knowing that the same technologies that enable the open internet can also do something more something very different and so we live with that technology as a neighbor and the most severe stakeholder outside mainland China for a very long time I worked on technologies that circumvent the technologies that works inside the profile for a very long time I would say it's just a different experiment they're running there My question and maybe one last thing you described yourself in some articles as a conservative anarchist what do you mean by that why conservative? Sure, a conservative has two meanings one is that I have some values I want to preserve as in conservancy, as in conserving a tradition and the tradition is the tradition that I've been living in for more than 20 years now the anarchistic tradition of internet and filmmaking and the filmmaking community is really the first political system that I encountered it was run by rough consensus and not by voting, not by presidents not by kings as a tradition that was raised and so it's something that I want to conserve but I also mean conservative in the other part which is the approach a conservative is rather than a progressive wants people to see that they can work with some new life gradually rather than changing or meditating or commanding people to change overnight so everyone who works with me joins on a voluntary basis they say there goes on a voluntary basis I try to facilitate them but I don't really give commands and that was true before I was additional minister now so I'm conservative in the sense that it's a very gradual change nobody is first to change if they don't want that creates a bit of a clash of culture I can imagine there's some very established ways of working in government I think so far it's just fine so far it's just fine because if I had a ministry that would be very difficult because there would already be a hierarchical organization but I have a office I don't have a ministry and from the very beginning I said this is not really office it's a space it's an open space that people are welcome to join well I said it's people are welcome to join and then some folks like the one over there decided that it's better called a space it's a volunteer so basically it's a space where people volunteer to join we're all like strangers really I don't know most of my staff and I certainly haven't worked with any of my staff except over the internet for just a few months at most it's really like any other ad hoc group we started with very simple coordination forms like chat rooms and kind of boards but gradually had an alignment of compass but we don't have a map and that's the culture we're trying to do here so the reason why this is possible at all is because I'm not forced to give commands but so of the 15 people 16 now in this space and of the 30 to 50 people as our participation office is around all the ministries and of the 25 youth counselors we're holding the same interaction engagement pattern and this is because none of them are here or commanded to great, thank you so much can I just ask you your age my age 35 solar years I take it now you're based full time and I want you to still come all over I try to reduce carbon emissions before I become additional I was working on telepresence technology so I would send robots like in Spain and also in Boston and other places so I still travel but actually and I also invite my friends to hear through robotic means I think by next year at most that would become much more appealing and it costs around the same as air travel but you can reuse it it's much more carbon neutral let's take a few pictures of you